Beyond the Fringe, 1960–62
Beyond the Fringe, the show that was to change the face of British comedy and West End theatre, did not, ironically, begin as an alternative to the theatrical Establishment. It was actually devised by the theatrical Establishment, in the person of John Bassett, the young assistant to the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh Festival. The official festival had been increasingly bedevilled during the late fifties by competing unofficial ‘fringe’ events, so Robert Ponsonby, the Artistic Director, had decided to mount his own challenge to the late-night interlopers. In 1959 he had put on a Flanders and Swann cabaret, and he was hoping to secure the services of Louis Armstrong for the following summer. When it became clear that this proposition was a non-starter, Bassett suggested actually trying to beat the amateur fringe comedians at their own game, by staging a professional revue that would unite the best Oxbridge performers of the last five years. Ponsonby gave him the go-ahead.
Not really knowing where to start, towards the end of 1959 Bassett paid a visit to Jonathan Miller, the tall, rangy, voluminously articulate star of the 1955 Footlights, whose wife’s sister he had known at school. The problem was that Miller had actually announced his retirement from comedy after the 1955 show had run its course, had entered the medical profession and had since restricted his performing career to the odd radio broadcast. Bassett cornered him, sterile dressing in hand, at the University College Hospital Casualty department, and persuaded him to take a short break from his new job. ‘I still fiercely regret the distraction,’ says Miller. ‘Much better to have been a very funny comic undergraduate and forget about it. But I got onto this terrible treadmill.’1 Bassett asked Miller to suggest another ex-Cambridge comedian. As far as Miller was concerned, the only possible candidate was still studying there: the brilliant young man he’d seen recently in a Footlights show, Peter Cook. Bassett tracked Peter down in Cambridge early in January and put the proposition to him.
Bassett then turned to Oxford, and secured the services of an old friend from his own undergraduate days: Dudley Moore, who had played in the same student jazz band before taking his degree in 1957. Moore was a natural clown who would be able to take care of the musical element in the show. As with Miller and Cambridge, he asked Moore to recommend another ex-Oxford star, to make up a cast of four. Moore suggested Alan Bennett, a shy, bespectacled Yorkshireman who specialised in take-offs of mealy-mouthed vicars and Christmas Royal broadcasts, whom he had never actually met. He knew, however, that Bennett had done well on the Edinburgh Fringe with the 1959 Oxford revue. Bennett, like Miller, needed to be persuaded, as by 1960 he too had retired from comedy and was well on the way to becoming a medieval historian.
The four men met in a small, unprepossessing restaurant on the Euston Road, close enough to Miller’s work to take advantage of his lunch hour. ‘It was an Indian restaurant,’ recalled Peter. ‘The main thing I remember was the food. It was revolting.’2 Bennett remembers it as an Italian meal, which suggests that the food must have been revolting in the extreme. Eight months later, when the four were the talk of the Edinburgh Festival, they informed the Edinburgh Evening News that they had all liked each other instantly on first acquaintance. The truth, according to Miller, was rather the reverse. ‘We were all jealously guarding our own little province. I think we were tremendously suspicious of one another and very competitive.’ Sartorially, Peter stood out. Bennett recalls that ‘He was dressed in the height of fashion. Now there wasn’t really any fashion early in 1960 – most people still dressed in sports clothes and flannels, but Peter had on a little shortie overcoat and narrow trousers, a not-quite-a-bum-freezer jacket, winkle picker shoes and a tie with horizontal bars across it; all stuff which came from a shop called ‘Sportique’ at the end of Old Compton Street. He took us there later, but we could never quite vie with him.’ Peter was carrying a huge armful of newspapers and a book on racing form. So prolific had his comic output become by this stage that he devoured newspapers almost as ammunition: the irrelevant facts that peppered his sketches were genuine, his arcane knowledge fuelled exhaustively by yards of newsprint.
Miller, Bennett and Moore all later confessed to John Bassett that they had gone to the meeting apprehensive about who would crack the first joke. They need not have worried. Miller recounts how, ‘As soon as Peter sat down at lunch, this flow of uncontrollably inventive stuff came out of him. It was impossible to compete with him, you couldn’t actually participate, there was no room for one to get in, one simply had to be an audience of it. It was very exhausting. Even when in fact you were helpless with laughter, you longed for it to finish, not merely because you were exhausted by the laughter but because there seemed to be no prospect of it coming to an end at all. He seemed very threatening to us all in that respect.’ Alan Bennett, who barely spoke a word, had similar misgivings. ‘I had the slight feeling I was there under false pretences – a feeling that never really left me. Peter was very funny and, to my alarm, very fluent. He appeared to be able to ad lib excellent material in monologues of spiralling absurdity.’3 Moore was feeling, if anything, even more cowed: ‘I was completely mute in front of these intellectual giants. I felt I was just there to supply music more than anything. They were all six foot two, and I was e foot two, which made a great deal of difference.’ When he demonstrated part of his act, in which a violin made baby sounds, Peter – who was also feeling the competition – openly laughed at it rather than with it. Moore did conclude, however, that Peter was the most approachable of the three, his manifest ambition tempered by relaxed manners and a good-natured charm. At the heart of these awkward introductions was a shared belief, later articulated by Moore: ‘All of us thought we were better than the others’;4 it was a belief that was undercut, for each of them, by the fear that it might not ultimately look that way to the paying public.
A few days later, Bassett took them all round to the Edinburgh Festival offices in St James’ Street, to present them to the Old Etonian and former Guardsman Robert Ponsonby. ‘They came and they played the fool. I could see we were onto something’5 was Ponsonby’s bluff verdict. Miller and Bennett were still unsure about whether or not to go ahead. Peter commented that ‘Jonathan had this doctor–comedian conflict, and Alan had this academic–comedian conflict. I had no conflict whatsoever, nor had Dudley. It was rather boring. We kept trying to think of something, such as “By day he is a Trappist monk, by night he is on the boards.”’6 Apparently, the fact that Peter was a full-time student supposedly bound for the Foreign Office did not represent any sort of conflict. His agent Donald Langdon had other objections. None of the other three were professional comedians, he pointed out, whereas Peter had a West End show under his belt. This tiny revue might be seen as a backward step. ‘Don’t jeopardise your career by working with these three amateurs,’ he recommended. Peter rather wanted to fill the summer with comic activity, and dissented. The compromise they came to was that Langdon would attempt to negotiate higher wages for him. Eventually the others agreed a flat fee of £100 each for writing and performing the show, whereas Peter received £110. When Langdon’s 10 per cent commission had been deducted, this left Peter with £99.
Over the next six months the four met sporadically to decide which of their favourite sketches should be included, and to write a few new ones. Occasionally they kept their hand in by performing at cabarets and balls. Wendy Snowden remembers being introduced to Alan Bennett at Lady Ismay’s house party: ‘He was lying on this great big four poster bed in Lady Ismay’s daughter’s bedroom, with his rucksack on the bed and his hiking boots by his head, reading a book on mediaeval history; and he looked up, like a little bleary badger, so unconcerned about this great party going on.’ Peter enjoyed shocking Bennett – an easy matter – with smutty jokes; his victim developed the habit of stuffing his handkerchief into his mouth in a mixture of embarrassment and guilty amusement. The other three admitted that they had never met anyone quite like Peter. According to Miller, ‘He ought to have bee
n an extremely successful young diplomat – that was the world Peter came from. You felt you were with somebody from the Foreign Office who had suddenly gone completely bananas.’7 Boarding a crowded tube with Bassett, Peter assumed a woman’s voice without warning and started to shout: ‘Where’s my baby? I’ve lost my baby! Let me back in, my baby’s in there!’ The rush-hour crowd naturally parted to let him through.
e four held many of their initial creative meetings at University College Hospital, in between Miller’s surgical operations. ‘There was no unified approach at all,’ says Bennett. ‘We each had our own ideas of what we wanted to be funny about.’8 Cook and Miller, both frighteningly articulate, tended to dominate and improvise. Bennett started to prepare material in order to keep pace at the meetings. Moore was simply paralysed by lack of confidence. ‘I felt totally constricted and overpowered. I was totally out of place with the other three. I didn’t contribute anything textually.’9
Apart from his lack of height, Moore felt let down by his humble beginnings. ‘I came from a working-class home in Dagenham. When I went up to Oxford as an organ scholar I really couldn’t open my mouth because everyone seemed frightfully suave and in control. I found that my voice started to do very strange things to toe the line. I was absolutely terrified when my parents came up that we’d all do the wrong thing. I ended up feeling very aggressive, with a great chip on my shoulder.’10 Moore had enjoyed an awkward relationship with his mother and father, and came from a family that rarely displayed its emotions. He had been born with a club foot, and had spent most of the war in hospital, the only child in a ward full of wounded soldiers, something he never forgave his mother for putting him through. He had been bullied at school on account of his disfigurement, and had taken up ‘fooling around’, as he put it, to deflect the violent attentions of bigger boys. At university he had started to perform in cabaret in the evenings, and had subsequently tried to become an actor, before settling for a job as a pianist with the John Dankworth and Vic Lewis orchestras in Britain and America. His social background could not have been more different from Peter’s, but otherwise the similarities were pronounced. It did not seem so at the time: Moore’s childhood problems visibly informed his every move, whereas Peter’s insecurities were well buried beneath layers of startling wit and social grace.
Peter supplied the bulk of the script for Beyond the Fringe: Moore later estimated Peter’s contribution at 67 per cent, with the other third shared between Miller and Bennett. There was only an hour’s worth to fill – they had been booked in to do a week at the Lyceum Theatre, following on at 10.45 p.m. from the Old Vic’s performance of The Seagull – but there were also competing demands on Peter’s stock of material. By the time the Fringe script had to be finalised, it became clear that Michael Codron and Kenneth Williams would be looking for a successor to Pieces of Eight. The latter, obviously, would be the ‘senior’ of the two projects. Peter saved One Leg Too Few and Interesting Facts for Kenneth Williams’s use; he also split his two nuclear sketches between the two projects, Williams getting Peace, the cynical anti-CND item, and Beyond the Fringe getting the pro-CND number, Whose Finger on What Button? This sketch was reconstructed by Miller and Bennett, but still contained some classic Cook moments:
We shall receive four minutes’ warning of any impending nuclear attack. Some people have said, ‘Oh my goodness me – four minutes? – that is not a very long time!’ Well, I would remind those doubters that some people in this great country of ours can n a mile in four minutes.
John Bird later called this ‘A joke which brilliantly clamped its teeth on that era’s self-delusion and hopeless nostalgia for power and glory.’11
Peter also decided to incorporate his Macmillan impression in Beyond the Fringe, although in general it was not he but Miller, and in particular Bennett, who pushed the show in a satirical direction. Peter and Dudley Moore pulled the other way, which slightly grated on the other two later, when the press came to the conclusion that Peter must have been the satirical prime mover. Miller remembers that ‘Peter resisted anything which might seem to be offensive to the audience or would seem to be upsetting the apple-cart. Alan had a harder, more satirical view.’ Peter had triumphed once in the West End with a mild, mainstream revue, and was cautious of alienating the general public. Perhaps more to the point, he knew that his mother would be in the country in August and had expressed a desire to visit the show. As for Dudley Moore, he admitted later to his biographer Barbra Paskin that: ‘I was always terrified that we’d get arrested for everything we did. I was very timid. And Jonathan, Alan and Peter treated that fear with total scorn, thinly disguised.’12
There were twenty sketches in all. Only the eight solo pieces were attributed to any author in the programme; but Peter’s principal contributions appear to have been Sitting on the Bench, the Mr Grole routine in which he was cast as a frustrated miner; Old J. J., the initials sketch devised at the Pembroke dinner table; Royal Box, an old Footlights piece in which Dudley played a man who’d been to see the show 497 times on the off chance that the Royal Family might pay a visit (inspired by the faithful regular fans of South Pacific, as witnessed at a matinee Peter had attended for a laugh with David Frost); Bollard, a parody cigarette commercial in which the highly effeminate cast suddenly affected deep, husky voices when the cameras rolled (this was the only sketch to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, to whom all stage scripts had then to be submitted: the characters were not allowed to call each other ‘love’ and the stage direction ‘Enter two outrageous old queens’ had to be amended to ‘Enter two aesthetic young men’); and This is the End (later retitled The End of the World), about a dull, nasal religious mystic and his band of followers, perched atop a mountain awaiting the final conflagration:
Peter:
Up here on the mountain we shall be safe. Safe as houses.
Alan:
And what will happen to the houses?
Peter:
Well, naturally, the houses will be swept away.
There was also a fine Shakespeare parody, So That’s the Way You Like It, to which Peter contributed one or two of his old Pembroke lines but which was mostly the work of the rather theatrically-minded Miller (‘Oh saucy Worcester, dost thou lie so still?’). Miller also contributed a rather old-fashioned monologue about the number of trousers in the London Transport Lost Property Department, which he had written in 1957 for a radio programme called Saturday Night on the Light. Bennett performed his famous sermon sketch, a variation of the act he’d been doing since 1956, in which a vicar attempted – increasingly feebly – to identify religious parallels in a series of everyday situations, all of which were supposed to stem from the ludicrous biblical text ‘My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man.’ Moore, still worried that he was being marginalised, devised a last-minute solo spot (a Beethoven-style version of Colonel Bogey with a never-ending coda) on the evening before the first night. Peter tried out all the material – his and the others’ – in performance whenever he could, both in public and in private. His Cambridge friend Mike Winterton remembers seeing him for the last time at an end-of-term tea party in the summer of 1960, ‘when the assembled company was reduced to near hysterical laughter as he held the floor acting out various sketches. It was only after we had seen the show that we realised Peter had been giving us a foretaste of Beyond the Fringe.’ The racing commentator Brough Scott saw a version of the complete show, minus Jonathan Miller, at Lady Ismay’s ball at a country house near Cheltenham, an engagement which Peter had organised. ‘He did his Harold Macmillan spoof with such cutting charm that soon even the purplest Colonel was guffawing through his moustaches. Nobody had ever heard of him, he was just a student doing a cabaret turn in front of the piano, but he was and remained the funniest person we had ever seen.’13 Everything was set for Edinburgh.
There remained only the central dilemma of which way Peter’s career would head after Beyond the Fringe. He still felt he owed it to his f
amily and the hopes they’d invested in him to make it to the Foreign Office; but to be sure of achieving that, he really needed a first-class degree. Without one there was little point in sitting the FO exam. He eventually received his results in July. He had managed a lower second. It was not good enough. To all intents and purposes, he had failed. The die was cast. If he was worried that his parents might be angry with him, he need not have been; neither of them so much as raised an eyebrow. If their beloved son was happy doing what he was doing, then that was enough for them. Peter himself always felt pangs of regret though, not so much because he’d missed out on the FO – although it would have been simpler than the life of a comedian – but because he thought he’d let them down. ‘I toyed with the idea of going into the Foreign Office,’ he later claimed, ‘but I don’t think the Foreign Office toyed with the idea of my joining them. It sounds appalling, but I’d have been perfectly happy at the Foreign Office. I’d still say yes if the Goverorship of Bermuda came up. I’ve always wanted to wear a plumed hat.’14 He told one interviewer that he had had ‘no intention of becoming a performer’ until the summer of 1960 and Beyond the Fringe.15
Bizarrely, just as Peter had decided to make a go of the comedy profession, another job offer came out of nowhere. Before they left London, the Fringe cast recorded three sketches for the BBC TV programme Tonight, for use in a special Edinburgh Festival programme. The producer Donald Baverstock was so impressed with Peter’s performance that he subsequently took him out to lunch and invited him to become a full-time interviewer on the show, on a salary of £35 per week. Peter hedged his bets. He would wait and see how Beyond the Fringe went before making a decision. In the event, the Edinburgh show’s success was to make up his mind for him.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 14